The present invention relates generally to paging systems and, more particularly, to paging terminal apparatus which, in cooperation with paging receivers with acknowledge back capability, provides selective page forwarding service at the election of the pager user.
Present day paging systems are efficient, sophisticated in technology and serve well large numbers of users. As a result, such systems are relied upon more and more to reach particular individuals wearing such paging receivers to deliver critical and urgent messages. Unfortunately, it cannot always be guaranteed that such messages for particular pagers will in fact be received when initially sent as intended. In the past, paging messages were sent without knowing whether users received them as intended or not. One way to overcome this, of course, has been to provide the paging receivers themselves with an acknowledge back capability which is activated, either manually or automatically, whenever their particular address is received and properly decoded. This assures that the pager is working satisfactorily and that the message originator may be notified with a good deal of confidence that the message was very probably received as intended. No specific action on the part of the pager user was necessarily required.
The above, of course, provided a substantial step towards assuring confidence in the reliability of the paging system. However, it did not address the problem regarding those instances in which acknowledge back is not perfected. It will readily be understood that the pager may be inoperative, the user may be out of effective signal range, or the pager may have been, accidentally or intentionally, turned off. Nevertheless, there are instances in which it is deemed imperative that the intended pager user be reached in one way or another. In still other instances, the pager user may receive, as intended, an important message that requires immediate action, but the pager user may be unable to respond himself and wish to alert some other member of his organization or staff to handle the situation. This usually requires that the pager user to interrupt whatever he is doing; for instance, negotiations with a valued client, and send a page to this other staff member by re-entering the message. This can be annoying and very disruptive to the pager user.
A solution to the problem of handling a message intended for a paging receiver which fails to acknowledge back is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,814,763 issued Mar. 21, 1989 to Nelson et al. entitled "Paging Terminal Apparatus with Page Forwarding Capability and Methodology Thereof." The paging terminal stores a set hierarchy listing of alternate pagers in the system which is used by the terminal to forward messages when a pager fails to acknowledge. An approach to the problem of redirecting received messages is also described in another embodiment of the same invention. In this embodiment, a method for use with pagers having multiple acknowledge back capability is described, whereby the specific acknowledge back response sent by the pager user after receiving a message can be a request to forward the message to another pager user based upon the same set hierarchy listing of alternate pager addresses stored in the terminal.
While terminal directed message forwarding is a large improvement over the prior art, there are instances when the hierarchy listing stored in the terminal apparatus does not include a pager or pagers to which the pager user may wish to forward his just received message. In addition, the hierarchal listing stored in the terminal apparatus cannot be easily changed by the pager user. Usually, the pager user will have to contact the paging service provider or paging system manager to have this listing modified. A message forwarding method is needed that allows the pager user to forward his received messages to any other valid pager user independent of and without impacting the regular terminal hierarchal directed message forwarding, as well as allow the pager user to easily modify his directory of forwarding addresses.
A more convenient and flexible arrangement is therefore needed which will allow a pager user, upon receipt of a message, to direct the forwarding of that same message to any valid pager user of the system.